Rome
27 May 2007
I feel
that I’m under attack. I’m being hounded. People keep asking
me to find solutions for weed-infested gravel. L goes one step further,
and seems to be accusing me of being solely responsible for our thigh-high
gravel-crop. He gives the impression that he believes I’m keeping
something from him – some simple, obvious way of eradicating weeds.
But I’m not. And there isn’t.
He came back from a romp around various gorgeous country hotels in Tuscany
and announced “but they have great sweeps of weed-free
gravel. Why can’t we?” I have explained, over and over, that
they have weed-free gravel because (1) they have fleets of gardeners and
(2) because aforementioned gardeners have no qualms about dousing any
weed that dares to show its head with the kind of noxious chemicals that
I wouldn’t let through our front gate. “It can’t
be just that, there must be something else,” he says. "Just”
that? Something else? Why on earth should you need more than
that? With those two drastic solutions, you simply don’t have a
problem.
Of course, if you lay your gravel over fleece, you do get a brief period
of grace before the weeds attack. And when they do appear, the weeds can
be easier to pull up.
But weeds (as L also refuses to believe) on the whole don’t come
from underground, where a nice thick fabric might just cut out enough
light to confound them. Their seeds get blown in from all around. Of course,
if all around, for hundreds of square metres, there is a nothing but perfect
manicured lawn and pristine garden beds, then they’re not going
to drift in in immense numbers. But if – as in our case –
all around is a verdant wilderness of seed-setting weeds, then they’re
drifting in in their zillions and our drive and car parks are a nice,
competition-less space for them to put down roots. What more could they
ask for?
Yes, we have a serious problem. Faced with this problem, L frets. About
what we’re doing wrong and why other people are getting it right.
I, on the other hand, pull up weeds. It’s excruciatingly boring
(pulling weeds out of lawns or gardens beds seems thrilling in comparison,
for some reason). It’s generally hot (there’s no tree cover
and the heat radiates off the gravel). And it never gets finished because
I only ever attack the bit closest to the wildeness that I have decided
to work on at any given time. But I do find that it’s the only way.
Internet forums have other suggestions. Some are just plain ridiculous,
and clearly written by people who like pontificating but have never actually
yanked out a weed in their lives. Like the wise bloke (I presume it was
male – it had a male ring to it) who suggested merely not watering
the weeds, and they’d surely die. Now, it’s quite difficult
to imagine anyone actually taking the hose to his or her unwanted pests
of an evening. This was a British site I was looking at – which
begs the question, how did this writer suggest keeping the water that
oozes constantly from the sky over there from nourishing the weed crop?
And anyway, even if GB is hit by devasting drought, I can assure him that
it will make no difference whatsoever. Because while “real”
plants gasp and wilt, those weeds will just carry on regardless, continuing
to look infuriatingly, tauntingly healthy. I know. I have a whole parched
drive and two parched car parks to prove it.
So, disregarding totally the ill-informed nutters, and the sites that
compare relative merits of different poisons, you find yourself with the
following options:
* flame throwers – clearly, these can’t be used if it’s
too dry around, otherwise you risk starting a major conflagration, which
is a rather extreme way of dealing with your weedy gravel problem. And
obviously, if your weeds are thigh-high like ours, then you’ll need
to strim first otherwise you won’t be able to get anywhere near
the crucial down-by-the-root bit. It’s best to wave your wand over
the plants a couple of times, on successive days. Then a week later you
need to go back and yank the shrivelled dead offenders out. All of which,
to me, sounds like a whole lot of time-consuming work... much more, say,
than sitting down – preferably under a large umbrella – and
just pulling them up unscorched.
* vinegar – some “organic” weed-killers claim to be
just vinegar, though usually the vinegar is combined with various noxious
nasties, according to most of the sites I visited. Who knows, I may try
this some time, though I dread to think what the nice people in the supermarket
in town will think of me when I go in there and buy up gallons and gallons
of vinegar. Because apparently, you have to drench your weeds, one by
one. Actually, now I come to think of it, there are some neighbours whose
“wine” bears a distinct similarity to vinegar. Maybe I could
ask them what they were thinking of doing with the many bottles they can’t
bring themselves to drink…
* salt – this was a very minority suggestion. Ancient Romans, of
course, sowed salt in the fields of vanquished enemies so that nothing
would grow there ever again, and those enemies would be forced to buy
food from the conquerors. So, I’m wondering, how is this meant to
work in the case of weeds in gravel? (No explanations were provided.)
Do I just sprinkle it on ? Or do I have to plough it in? Will my weeds
swiftly wither? And what happens when it rains and the salt leeches into
the surrounding garden beds? Will everything else go the way of the weeds?
Having reviewed the possibilities, my final decision was: step up the
search for someone to help in the garden. Though of course, now that I’ve
reached this momentous decision, I find that there is no one who does
that kind of work. Naturally, Luigi’s eye lit up when I mentioned
this to him… in the hope that he’d pull a useful unemployed
grandson out of his hat. He clearly saw himself tinkering about endlessly.
I backtracked swiftly of course: what is the point of employing someone
who can’t see and definitely can’t bend over to remove the
weeds from your car park? (The moment my back was turned he’d be
in there with his chemicals, “saving” me from my own city-slicker
stupidity.) Marco, the lovely, obsessively orderly boy who cuts our fields
for us, thought he could come up with someone easily. But even he is not
finding it simple at all. Because you don’t want just anyone hanging
about your usually-empty house, being relied upon not only to put in the
requisite hours without supervision but also not to issue garden-visit
invitations to disreputable cronies. Suddenly the prospect of having
a garden helper doesn’t look wholly enticing.
Which means, of course, that I’ll have to get weeding. Ahime!
